Promise of a better future - a talk about a concurrency model called futures

Concurrency is hard. Necessarily so. However our tools make it harder than it has to be. Promises and futures is a concurrency abstraction that cater to many common use cases for concurrency, and make writing correct and concurrent software easier. In this talk, we will see what the status quo looks like, what the problems with the existing approaches are, and how promises and futures can help us do better. I will talk about what we learned in past two and half years, about where these techniques shine, and where you are better off using some other tools. The examples will make use of Java, JavaScript, and Scala, and some knowledge of functional programming would help digest concepts better.

I am a SoundClouder and have been writing software professionally for the past four years. I have a great deal of interest in programming languages and type systems. I believe there is an immense amount of wisdom lying in things dismissed under "academic" pejorative, which I humbly aim to bring to the mainstream, and help improve the software situation. The last couple of projects I worked on had concurrency at their heart, and employed some novel techniques in the field to a great effect. I wish to share those learnings and experiences, and help popularize the ideas that they found to work for them.